"It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority…
…Pomp, an unwholesome diet, a cause of choler, a pleasure paid to late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour."
Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian, Chapter Six, P173.
Petafloptimism 